Small Justice

Story Line

Small Justice follows paralegal Diane Hofheimer and her attorney husband as they represent three women, all loving mothers, who have lost custody of their children to men with demonstrated histories of sexual abuse and domestic violence. These women, all articulate, thoughtful, educated, are just some of the women who tell of the horror of watching their children ripped from their arms to be handed over to the person who abused them.

New research, personal stories, as well as the letters and e-mails sent to Small Justice, indicate that the family courts are often biased against battered women and/or ignorant of the manipulations of batterers and abusers.

Background

In order to understand how and why this can happen, one must look at the system in the family courts.

Where the ordinary rules of evidence do not apply, where there are no guidelines for what should be accepted as "expert" testimony, and where judges routinely take children away from the protective parent and place them in the care of the person the children have named as their abuser. The frightening, ugly truth is that manipulative abusive people, the kind that have made headlines from Boston to Los Angeles, tend to be great liars. They are people with superficial charm, who make better witnesses in court, than the people that have been abused.

Without the checks and balances of the rules of evidence and cross examinations, children are frequently handed over to parents who have been demonstrated to be guilty of child rape and acts of deplorable, heartbreaking violence. Something is terribly wrong. This is the issue that Small Justice explores.